Femme du Monde (Woman of the World) by Patricia Spears Jones

Description:

These are poems of positions and relationships, shifting angles on received wisdom or cultural cliche, fiercely signifying in an age of raging information and vicious exploitation. For Patricia Spears Jones, subjectivity is a challenge and a bugaboo. "Who wants to know your stuff unless Subject (Black and Female) is violated and/or perseveres against all odds?" asks Spears Jones. She tackles grand issues like racism and sexism, but with an intimate poet's eye to details, moments, miracles, pains, and the wildness of the moon and stillness of water. History and the visual serve as analogs for this collection, tying together a diverse group of poems written about the paintings and statuary in Paris; mansions in Virginia; the commes de garcons store in Soho; or a chocolate shop's window in Munich.

This is a textured landscape of troubles and terrors and temptations galore. A world that would look familiar to Dante, whose observations about winners and losers haunts these poems. "We know more than we care to admit and live lives of such great challenge that where humor and awe finds us is where poetry begins," Spears Jones writes. "Luck is a harsh thing to hang one's life on. Better to be curious. Get up. Walk out the door and face what the world offers with humor, with courage, with joy."

From a review by Janet Hamill:
"Femme du Monde is the third collection by New York-based poet Patricia Spears Jones, and in it one gathers a strong sense of a woman moving from geographical place to place, victorious -- the sophisticated lady, invulnerable. A little scared, a little weary. She has been there, done that, and then some. She may be trailing a Mercedes with Texas plates over the Mississippi, strolling the Quai Voltaire, or waiting for a cross-town bus. Wherever she is, she's in for the "long haul." And whatever the place or circumstance, her aesthetic antennae create an invisible shield behind which she safely extracts the essence of her experience. The shield is her magic armor -- the suit under which the poems get under her skin. It may not be completely impenetrable. Love is lost; friends die too soon; the heat of the 4th of July on Long Island Sound conjures visions of "the hell on earth" of "slave ships gorged with cargo and rum" flowing "north from Barbados to New England." The old woman singing La vie en rose on the Paris metro smells of "cheap tobacco" and "unwashed garments." John Wayne wants to kill Monty Cliff in Red River and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof isn't just about Liz's lingerie, it's about Big Daddy's "C.A.N.C.E.R" and the black servants cashing in their patience. The suit has a few dents and tiny holes, but it's thick enough. It allows the poet's "knotted heart" to untie itself; and with Spears Jones's world-weary sense of humor, that sufficiently creates just the right barrier, in a "life held together with wishful thinking and krazy glue," to see and feel "jazzmen in the falling stars." 

I was thoroughly seduced by Femme du Monde, by the grit and blood, wit, flesh, bone, and spirit of which the poems are made. From the particular they move to the universal, effortlessly. From the body they dissolve into space. The world they reference is mundane. The world they reference is marvelous. The senses perceive, the poet distills, and life is reduced to a healing elixir."

Femme du Monde
(Woman of the World)
by Patricia Spears Jones

ISBN: 1882688317
ISBN-13: 9781882688319
Publisher: Tia Chucha (Northwestern University Press)
Publication Date: 2006
Format: Paperback, 120 pages
Book Type: New